


À Vaillant Coeur

by alientongue



Category: Vampire: The Masquerade, Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Ending, Anarch Movement (Vampire: The Masquerade), Backstory, Fear of Death, Gen, Graphic Descriptions of Injuries, Grief/Mourning, Past Abuse, Redemption
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-08
Updated: 2020-11-20
Packaged: 2021-03-08 21:13:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 7,517
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27443206
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alientongue/pseuds/alientongue
Summary: “Tell you what.” Jack fishes a cigarette box out of his vest pocket, plucks a cigarette from it, and puts it between his no-longer-smiling lips without lighting it. “How’s about we play one more joke tonight?”Torpor is lapping at the edges of LaCroix’s consciousness, an ocean of tar. He continues to peer at Jack and thinks about paleontologists prying out black-stained bones.Jack’s hand once again delves back into his pockets. “If you can haul your ass to the curb,” he says, “I’ll hail you a cab.”Sebastian LaCroix survives the first night of Anarch reclamation of Los Angeles through a miracle. Every other night is up to him.
Comments: 27
Kudos: 34





	1. Good Morning, Los Angeles

**Author's Note:**

> takes place after Vouloir, c’est Pouvoir but can be read as a standalone

The night sky is so very dark in this city.

Sebastian LaCroix no longer remembers what the night looked like in Calais two hundred years ago, but it can’t have been like this; the light pollution and smog were yet a thing of the future. Los Angeles, of course, is the picture of modernity, and he has to check whether the faint, glinting pinpricks move before naming them one of the precious few stars. Sometimes it’s nothing but the signal of an airplane overhead.

Humans of this era are so bold. The altitude of these airplanes must be hundreds, even thousands of feet—not a single passenger could hope to survive a fall from that distance.

He stares up into a single, motionless speck of light dwarfed by the dark. The concrete underneath his back is tacky with cool vitae. How far a fall could he survive? Five floors, six? All three dozen floors of Venture Tower? How much distance was lopped off his sentence by the brutal mercy of a conference center’s roof?

Does it matter? A signal drifts across the sky in his peripheral vision, breathtaking speed rendered a crawl at this distance. A death sentence is a death sentence. Sebastian LaCroix is going to die.

There is the fear as it has always been, cold and constricting from the core of his chest to the tips of his fingers. If his heart still beat, what a drumroll it would play against his ribs, so it’s just as well that it doesn’t. LaCroix is nearly certain that right now his ribcage is more mosaic than skeleton.

His chest throbs, but he has no blood left to knit that mosaic back together. His eyes sting, but he has no blood left for tears. The very last drop bought him an instant’s Fortitude before he hit concrete, and he’d been so stupid for thinking that instant was a miracle when what could have been a quick death is now a struggle to keep above torpor’s surface, treading more tar than water. If he’s submerged—if he falls asleep bared to the rising sun—he’ll never wake up again.

And he is still just as stupid, because he fights that. Because he knows, he _knows_ better than to hope for a miracle, but he drags his heavy, Beast-forsaken body back into the waking world on the miserable, impossible chance that something will come save it before sunrise.

...Another night, it might not have been an impossibility, but tonight the stars and the airplanes alike all glitter above a plume of bright flame as if Venture Tower is nothing but a leviathan candle. Neck lolling against the roof, he no longer has the strength to lock his line of vision away from it; he no longer has the strength to rein in his meandering thoughts.

It is an odd mercy, the delirium before death. When Sebastian was a boy, all anyone had was candlelight, and he remembers those trips to the market when his father would twist the candlemaker’s wares to and fro in the light. Had to make sure the wax was of good quality, would melt well without cracking, since any merchant would cut the corners off a greater profit if they could get away with it—hah, imagine how a candlemaker would make a living _these_ days. He bets they wouldn’t, bets they would try and fail and slowly dwindle towards an inevitable death in this uncaring era.

Ah, he wants to go back. He wants to go back. _Ik wil naar huis_ , that first piece of Dutch he’d ever been able to scrounge together, candles and a sky full of stars. He wants a miracle.

Please. Please. Dutch, English—he’ll say it however he needs to if something will just come save him.

The wind rushes overhead. A siren wails in the distance. Footsteps ring on metal grating, distant, then they draw nearer and the bubble of wistful melancholy around Sebastian quivers. He blinks, disoriented. Time has been relegated to an infinitesimal pace, he could have sworn, but as leisurely as they are, the footfalls approach quickly and without ceremony.

Smiling Jack reaches the final landing of the conference center’s fire escape with a pocketknife in his hands. He’s swinging it back and forth by the blade in a motion too nonchalant and imprudent to mean he intends to kill anything but a bit of time; when his eyes trawl across LaCroix, he whistles through a grin. “Well, whaddaya know. Tonight’s just full of surprises.” Whatever’s gleaming in his eyes looks nothing like surprise.

The melancholy breaks so thoroughly and instantaneously apart that LaCroix can neither be sure he felt it in the first place nor discern what replaces it. For a moment, he may as well feel nothing at all. His body is shaking, tips of his fingers to something in the very core of his chest, and he is so abruptly, rawly vulnerable, a fawn folded all spindly legs and wet eyes into the underbrush.

Jack’s grin just inches higher up his weathered, coarse-bearded face. “What, not gonna thank me for the gift? I wrote you a note and everything.”

Oh, he had, hadn’t he. _Love, Jack._

Somewhere in the flames, hundreds of feet up, is what used to be a broken window.

It all slots into place now with vivid, howling intensity: LaCroix is _furious_. If he’s ever felt anything else it evaporated on contact with the thing burning through every circuit of his body and he can’t bring himself to care because what good will it do him now? Nothing’s left. Jack’s drawn the curtains to a close and the last act has branded all that came before a tragedy.

All for nothing. Suffering without meaning or reason or reprieve.

“I’m going to kill you.” LaCroix forces his trembling, cracking voice into the most sincere words he can remember having ever spoken. “I’m going to kill you, _you son of a bitch—_ ”

Twirling his pocketknife between two fingers, Jack cackles. LaCroix wants more than anything in the world to tear that bobbing Adam’s apple out with his teeth, doesn’t care if the blood is foul so long as it spills all over the concrete. “Aw, now ain’t that precious! You and what army, kiddo?” 

The blade of his knife comes to a clean stop, its point towards the concrete where LaCroix’s broken body refuses to lunge at him. “In case you haven’t noticed, you couldn’t hurt a fly right now even if you wanted to.” His fangs are tobacco-stained where they jut through his smile. “Especially if you wanted to, I’m betting.”

LaCroix doesn’t expect himself to laugh, but he can’t make the noise stop—can only wait out the spasms and clutch onto the burning circuits of his veins like so many lifelines. If he isn’t furious, what is he? Stupid? Scared?

In the back of his head, he expects Jack to cut him off. Jack doesn’t. He only watches, arms crossed, until breath by sobbing breath the laughter peters out. Still wheezing, LaCroix peers dully back at him and doesn’t want to think about feeling anything anymore.

“Tell you what.” Jack fishes a cigarette box out of his vest pocket, plucks a cigarette from it, and puts it between his no-longer-smiling lips without lighting it. “How’s about we play one more joke tonight?”

Torpor is lapping at the edges of LaCroix’s consciousness, an ocean of tar. He continues to peer at Jack and thinks about paleontologists prying out black-stained bones.

Jack’s hand once again delves back into his pockets. “If you can haul your ass to the curb,” he says, “I’ll hail you a cab.” What he fishes out this time, rolled-up and battered—

It’s a blood bag. It’s a blood bag, and he’s tossing it next to LaCroix before he turns around, lights his cigarette, and starts back down the fire escape, the picture of insouciance.

It doesn’t matter that every cell of LaCroix’s body, muscle and ligament and bone, screams in protest of movement because even through that warped, smudged plastic he can smell the blood sloshing inside, it doesn’t matter that the liquid is cold and half-congealed and thin because it’s still easing his body back together, washing through his parched veins. He drinks until the bag is perfectly empty, and then when the blood starts overflowing his eyes instead he laps up every tear.

He sits up. His head reels and his back pangs nigh-unbearably, but they still obey. They still move, they can still carry him away from the sunrise, and it’s now that he has to take a deep, sharp, rasping breath to keep his eyes from welling again with some unnameable emotion. Instead of a death sentence, he has a cab to catch. A trap, maybe, but a _chance_. No matter how slim, there is now a possibility that Sebastian LaCroix is going to live.

If he stands, he may very well topple off the roof; he crawls to the fire escape, only daring to prop himself upright with a white-knuckled grip on the railing. Legs wobbling, knees fighting not to buckle, dead heart throbbing behind ribs cobbled whole again, he descends a step. The whole flight of stairs stretches so painfully far to the ground—but one step, that he can manage.

So he does, over and over, lips parted around rasping huffs of exertion. Rust smudges his palms where they wrap around the railing, the smell of metal and smoke raking across his palate. His suit is torn, alternatingly soaked and stiffened with his own vitae, both clammy and rough against his skin. The world swallows him back into itself with a million miserable sensations, but each of them means he is _alive_.

Other Kindred over the ages have lamented that their condition was no better than a more traditional death, and LaCroix doubts that any of those laments were made in the face of Final Death. Even without breath, without heartbeat, without the creature comforts of the mortal world, he has his existence—he clutches onto his existence like a street dog snarling over rancid meat. His, his, rotten and sour but the only thing left of his own.

He hardly registers when the railing ends and the soles of his shoes scrape over concrete. It takes him a moment, swaying hunched over the last arch of flaking pipes, to remember what was beyond the many single steps: a cab. He has, indeed, hauled his ass to the curb, so Smiling Jack should have hailed him a cab.

Almost there. He staggers forward unsupported until his shoulder hits brick wall; he braces himself against it, lets the wall bear his weight as he shuffles inch by inch closer to a sickly blot of streetlight.

Just around the corner of the conference center is a cab, and he nearly weeps for the sight. Pushing off from brick, he rides a squall of feverish relief to the tinted windows before the door to the backseat pops open.

To describe what LaCroix does as climbing would take a generosity the world does not possess. He collapses into the backseat, limp, barely remembering or able to pull the door shut behind him. The engine hums around him, and he slumps across matte vinyl nigh-indistinguishable from a mortal corpse.

Miraculously, the cab driver is unfazed. “Where to?”

LaCroix stares into the vague beige of the roof, the pitch-black sunglasses in the rearview mirror. There is a safety in the transience of this place; he doesn’t want to leave. He doesn’t know how he would leave.

The cab driver’s fingers tap in smooth sequence against the steering wheel. “I can only take you where you want to go.”

The penthouse office of Venture Tower. A seaside house in Calais, its first floor repurposed into a general store. A hideaway in the grasslands of Africa where the scrubland just begins to give way into forest and the north star is framed perfectly by the den window.

LaCroix’s voice is brittle and quiet. “I don’t have anywhere left.”

One dark eyebrow rises over one dark lens in the rearview mirror, inquisitive rather than at all alarmed, and the accented voice from the driver’s seat is even-toned. “Are you certain of that? There may be someone you would yet leave behind come morning.”

After so many decades, there is already someone he’s left behind tonight. There’s a hollow space in LaCroix’s chest the shape of a comfort who no longer exists. No matter where he goes in Los Angeles, the north star will never be so bright, and he curls forward in the backseat, throat tightening.

This time, the driver sighs. “A ghoul, perhaps,” he offers.

Realization jolts him out of his spiral. He’d forgotten: Mercurio, with his Santa Monica apartment and his steadfast loyalties. Mercurio, with sixty years dammed by LaCroix’s blood. Pathetic as he may be, LaCroix is still of use to _someone_.

“24 Main Street, Santa Monica,” LaCroix says, abrupt haste the final blow to crack his voice. “As fast as you can get there. _Go._ ”

The driver rumbles a noise of acknowledgement, shifts out of park, and begins to accelerate down the road out of the city until nothing of Venture Tower is visible but the fire at its peak.


	2. i.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A chance, no matter how slim.

The whole world is a searing roil of gunpowder smoke and screaming and so, so much red as the sun begins to rise, and Sébastien can barely force the fear-sick bile back down his throat.

None of this is as it should be. The glory of the emperor should have been an impenetrable shield, an implacable sword, before that small, simple happy ending, that triumphant return home with the status and glory the LaCroix of Calais had sought so long. 

Their youngest son an officer of Napoleon’s valiant army—wouldn’t that have made a lovely addition to those titles they’d accrued over the years? They would tell him that, his father already drafting a letter to the printing presses, and Sébastien would chuckle at his dinner chair, would magnanimously wave off any claim of exceptional accomplishments.

Throat thick with some horrible bitterness from the person-shaped shadows first light casts over the mud, he chokes on his breath, pressed so close to the ground he must be distinguishable from those shadows only by the scarlet accoutrements of his uniform. Panic clamps viselike over his hammering heart. With shaking hands, he tears off all the baubles, all the bright fabric he can think to reach—if they find him, if they find him, _if they find him _—__

__Another man, braver than him but no more noble, tears past him, legs nearly flying across the churned earth of the battlefield. He moves with such speed, with such raw, visceral desperation, that Sébastien’s breath stops once more as he watches from the muck, and for an instant Sébastien wants nothing more than for him to make it away._ _

__But a shot pierces the air like a needle threading one more strand of reality; the man who could have been part of Sébastien’s platoon falls as fast as he ran and then moves no more. Sébastien’s senses blur for a lurching moment as he barely resists retching. There’s no use shooting a dead man, but corpses don’t retch._ _

__The first sensation to reach him clearly again is the sound and vibration of approaching footsteps. His body seizes; he goes perfectly still. Heat wells in his stinging eyes. Please. Please._ _

__Far too close, the footsteps stop. A voice barks something in a language he doesn’t understand. He remains motionless, save for perhaps a trembling lip and a heart pounding wildly in his chest as if it’ll never have the chance to again. The same voice barks something again, the toe of a boot digs into his chest, and there is the sound of a rifle cocking before Sébastien’s mind goes entirely blank and he rolls over to cower in the mud._ _

__Of its own accord, his voice is pleading, high-pitched and broken, while his body grovels in front of these unfamiliar soldiers. None of this could be further from triumph. None of this could be further from a happy ending._ _

__And yet—when the men laugh, when they give orders Sébastien only understands through the accompanying gestures, when he is prodded to his feet and marched along by the point of a bayonet, he is still alive._ _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> surprise surprise, between each two chapters of lacroix's adventures in the 2000s is gonna be a shorter little flashback interlude


	3. Good Evening, Santa Monica

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A regnant-ghoul reunion.

For a while, LaCroix is aware of very little: the muted roar of tires on pavement, the palm-dotted scenery whipping past, the color creeping slowly up the blanching horizon and filtered through tinted windows. Not Los Angeles any longer. Not his domain any longer, if it ever was.

_WELCOME_ , a sign over the highway reads in inviting capital letters LaCroix only has a second to read, and after that second he’s aware of nothing at all.

There is a dark, absolute silence in which the Ventrue Sebastian LaCroix may not even exist.

And then there is the smell of blood.

Some visceral foundation of himself stirs. Not an undercoat, not exactly—more aptly, the canvas on which his personhood is painted, layer by oil layer. The Beast wakes, dragging a groggy LaCroix with it, and when the latter blinks the sleep from his eyes he’s lying on his side, teeth bared, fingers curled into a set of deep gouges on the arm of a leather sofa. Across the room, backed into the door with a stake gripped in one hand, Mercurio looks thoroughly spooked.

The bewilderment must show on LaCroix’s face, because no sooner has he taken this in than Mercurio relaxes, shoulders sagging as he heaves a sigh of relief. “Oh, good, there you are.” With impressively-executed nonchalance, he sets the stake down on a side table. “Great to see you back, boss.”

Groggy or not, LaCroix didn’t survive the two centuries leading up to last night by taking ostensive mundanities at face value. “What was that in your hand?”

Shifting his weight awkwardly between one foot and the other, Mercurio sucks a hissing breath through his teeth. “Gotta hand it to ya, you’re pretty sharp for a guy who did his best corpse impression for nearly twenty-four hours. It’s, uh.” He raps his knuckles against a few of the carved insets ringing the table’s surface. “Let’s call it insurance, eh?”

A dark smear peeks out from his sleeve and draws LaCroix’s attention with magnetic compulsion; it’s an instant later he realizes why. There’s a horizontal cut across Mercurio’s wrist, shallow and deliberate, from which dark, ghoulishly rich blood is welling.

Mercurio follows his eyes, then offers a weak shrug. “Had to get you to rise and shine somehow, boss. If the PM hours weren’t doin’ the trick, I figured I might as well set out the ol’ eggs and bacon before it was too late.”

Right, the threat of torpor. It was hard enough to resist on the roof—once the adrenaline and the watery reserves of Jack’s final joke dried up, it would be no wonder if LaCroix’s body shrank into that cocooning dormancy without any guarantee of more blood.

Brow furrowing, LaCroix glances pointedly up from Mercurio’s dripping wrist and back again. “If you would be so kind, then.”

Yet another breath rattling past gritted teeth, Mercurio grimaces. “Alright, I know this is going to sound _real_ stupid coming from a guy who had to pack heat to handle your beast mode, but I’m not sure I’m allowed to right now.”

In addition to his adrenaline and blood reserves, LaCroix’s patience is running dangerously thin; he makes a noise between a groan and a growl, aware of how his lip curls back over knifepoint fangs. “Why in Christ’s name not? I’m your _regnant_.” That title, at least, would have to be torn away independent of Princehood.

If anything, Mercurio’s grimace draws exponentially deeper lines across his features, and he skirts the side table to sink into an armchair past it. The stake is still within arm’s reach. “Okay, so. Just to make sure, you’ve heard not to shoot the messenger, right?”

LaCroix lets his nails dig further into the sofa and tries very hard not to think about the dominoes he’s watched fall, about the dominoes assuredly farther down the line. “I’m familiar with the saying, yes.”

Arm braced against rather than slung over the back of the armchair, feet squarely on the tile floor, behind the same veneer of nonchalance Mercurio looks unconvinced but begins anyway. “To sum things up, fledgling’s with the Anarchs, and near everyone else is following suit. Therese and Jeanette agreed for once—Santa Monica’s Anarch territory, and the Camarilla better watch their step if they wanna check in. Doesn’t seem like they’re going to, though.”

He chews on the side of his cheek for a second before continuing. “After news went out that you bit the dust, higher-ups passed the crown on down to Strauss. Bit too late, though, since the Anarchs made clear as goddamn crystal they’re not having another Prince in LA. Camarilla could be back five, ten years in the future, but they ain’t here now.” He leans forward, taps his fingers restlessly against the top of the leather cushion. “You getting all this, boss?”

As well as Strauss had hidden most of his machinations, LaCroix had been too intimately familiar with that ambition, that desperate craving for power, not to recognize it—the schadenfreude of such an empty victory for Strauss is both cruel and profoundly satisfying. He chuckles bitterly and finds he can’t muster the concern to fret over an Anarch victory. When hadn’t this city belonged to them in anything but fripperies?

“Well enough,” LaCroix says, voice rougher than he expects. “Continue.”

Mercurio doesn’t appear reassured, but once again, he obeys his prompting. “You can probably guess, but this all leaves me between a rock and a hard place.” Raising a closed fist, he coughs into it. “Uh, no offense, but the Camarilla didn’t exactly have the brightest view of you before they packed their bags. Lots of accusations, lots of criticism, and when the Prince isn’t around to hear those his ghoul’s still gotta be taken care of.” 

His lips press into a hard line. “Wouldn’t you know it, after all those years I’ve been working for ‘em, they nearly sicced one of their sheriffs on me—new one, not the brick shithouse you kept around, but I still wouldn’t be winning any fights. The Anarchs were ready to kick me to the curb, too.

“I probably wouldn’t be here talking to you right now if Jeanette hadn’t vouched for me.” When he looks back from the middle distance, there’s something dark and rueful in his eyes. “Nice girl. Don’t know why she did it, but I’m not gonna look a gift horse in the mouth when it could kick me to death.”

It’s perfectly natural. A new Prince would entail a new sheriff—it’s common sense, and LaCroix doesn’t know why it hadn’t occurred to him before. Doesn’t know why the idea of another vampire in a long, dark coat, flanking their charge in formalwear, makes him feel so sick. Doesn’t know why his chest hurts, all of a sudden, as the idle thought strikes him that there will never be that same Sheriff again.

And if even Mercurio, steadfast, loyal Mercurio, could be put under the sword of the Camarilla, what hope would he have had of being anything but more collateral damage in the shift of power? What hope would anyone but the most vicious have had? No matter how long he spends in this unlife, nothing has been able to fill in the grooves stamped into him: the only thing anyone can hope for is to obtain, and then maintain, power.

LaCroix lies, hungry and hurting and exhausted, on the couch of a prisoner’s apartment.

The rueful look in Mercurio’s eyes has dissipated into something more worried. “...You alright, boss? You’re not looking so good.”

Eyes sharpening, narrowing, LaCroix meets Mercurio’s gaze, and as he does he reaches into himself for that sheer imposition of will. “Have you told the Anarchs of my presence here already, or have you yet to pass that on?” There’s a razor-edged severity to the question.

Mercurio stiffens. He’s far from unfamiliar with the use of Dominate, that much LaCroix knows, but he can’t do anything to stop the way his eyes glaze over just slightly before he begins to speak. “I haven’t told them.” A pause. “I don’t plan on telling them, even if Therese and Jeanette would want me to.”

This time, LaCroix himself pauses. The edge slips out of his voice, still severe but no longer extraordinarily so. “Why?”

Helplessly, Mercurio shakes his head. “Boss, I’ve worked for you forty years. I’m not gonna say you haven’t been an asshole sometimes, but Camarilla or not, you haven’t let me die yet.”

LaCroix huffs; he’s not sure why, but at least he keeps his false breath from shaking. “It’s no wonder Jeanette allowed you to live. She must find your naivete endearing.”

A laugh wheezes out of Mercurio. “Gee, thanks. Guess I can think of worse things than for a pretty girl to find me cute.” The tension finally bleeds out of his posture, and he slumps forward, propping his elbows on his knees. “I can’t say I know all of how I’m gonna do it, but I’ll try my best to keep you kickin’ without the Voermans catching wind of it. So long as you don’t go stirring up trouble over another sarcophagus or something.”

LaCroix laughs, too, voice hoarse through a tightening throat. “I’ve had enough of sarcophagi to last a lifetime, thank you very much.” The venom he’d intended to lace through each word doesn’t quite make it, curdling into something considerably more wretched.

Mercurio is fortunately perceptive enough to change the subject nigh-immediately. “There isn’t any Malkavian thing we need to watch out for, right? No, uh, batshit prophecy mind powers that’d tell them you’re here?”

Pursing his lips, LaCroix casts his mind’s eye back through the various Disciplines and clan quirks he’s been privy to over the years and grapples with a rising unease. “Obfuscate I doubt will present issue, though I admit I know little of what extents Dementate is capable of. Auspex…” 

He catches the unease blooming into outright panic in time to quiet himself. Of course. If either of the Voermans know where to look, the potency afforded by their generation will make pinpointing him child’s play, and the authority afforded by their status will make routing him, cornering him, much of the same.

He shrinks into himself, Mercurio tensing in his peripheral vision. “Oh, shit,” Mercurio is mumbling, “yeah, that one’s gonna be a problem. Shit.” Unthinking, LaCroix watches the toe of his shoe tap a feverish rhythm on the floor. “Might have to check in with a few contacts, call in a few favors—”

From just outside the apartment door comes a peal of girlish laughter. Giggling, even. It’s followed by a voice, playfully, innocently teasing. “Oh, little bunny, it’s a bit too late for that! I came over as _soon_ as we had a nice Insight about you and our favorite Prince, so would you be a dear and open the door?” In demonstration, there’s a melody drummed out on the paneling: _shave-and-a-haircut, two-bits_.

Mercurio swears again, far more loudly, and LaCroix freezes stock-still at what’s unmistakably the voice and manner of one Jeanette Voerman.


	4. ii.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He's never been one for taking the ostensible at face value.

It’s a horrible blessing, the regularity of life as a prisoner of war: Sébastien wakes before dawn, is fed a meager, unpalatable meal, works until dusk, is fed another meager, unpalatable meal, and goes to sleep. Days pass, one upon the other, and were this the thick of wartime the prisoners would have been relocated, would have been bustled away from their advancing rescuers. But they are not. Days pass, uncountable.

Most nights, Sébastien dreams of home. He dreams of Calais, of the hearth at one end of his family’s general store, of the shy and handsome young man his parents had hired in his stead once it became clear he would leave for the Academy. He’d assisted the man in learning his routine, those few days before his departure—it had been the end of spring, then, hadn’t it? This year, or the year before?

The air is beginning to warm again, and it makes something beneath his ribs hurt.

Some nights Sébastien dares not think of come morning. Some nights he dreams not of home, but of the very same camp, the very same jailers. There is the shame of it, of course, but the fear worms deeper, prickling, because he may suffer, but he hasn’t died. He knows one devil already.

Tonight, though—tonight Sébastien does not have the chance to dream of anything. No sooner has he sunken, bone-tired, into his assigned bunk than there is a sharp call from outside, followed by an equally sharp rustle of fabric and a shaft of lamplight striking his face from the open tent flap. He stiffens, blinks. The light is eclipsed by a tall man’s figure.

One of the jailers approaches, another remark on his razor-edged tongue, but Sébastien knows well enough by now when he is meant to rise and obeys. Lamplight defines the figure further, finely-tailored formalwear accented by tasteful and expensive-looking jewelry. On the man’s left breast is a brooch the color of January ice, and when Sébastien looks up to his face he is smiling, eyes directly meeting the prisoner’s.

Words are exchanged between the man and the jailers, none of which Sébastien understands, but he knows this much: tonight he and he alone is freed from the camp. Tonight he is led into the back of a carriage whose curtains hang too thick over the windows to see any of its surroundings with a well-dressed, well-mannered man who gives him the same look he’s seen so many other rich socialites give a particularly interesting bauble for sale.

When the curtains are finally drawn back, he recognizes not a single feature of the landscape save for the fact that it’s an eminently wealthy estate. The aristocratic man speaks again to him, and though dares not voice his incomprehension the man seems to glean it anyway, seems to find it funny; he laughs heartily before the carriage driver dismounts, curtsies to him, and retrieves from her pocket an ornate blindfold.

Sébastien is correct in assuming the latter is for himself.


	5. The Late Night Show

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An old acquaintance rears her head.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> mention of LaCroix being pegged previously in this chapter, folks

In the end, it’s Mercurio who opens the door for Jeanette to skip over the threshold.

Her glittering eyes sweep over him and LaCroix both, her red-painted lips quirk coyly upwards, and Mercurio is already scrambling to apologize. “Listen, Ms. Voerman, I know what this looks like, but I swear I ain’t trying anything—”

She lifts a single finger to his lips. “Shhh. What’s got you so worried, bunny? You know I’m just as happy to see our little Prince hale and hearty as you are!” While Mercurio snaps his mouth shut, blinking, Jeanette gives him a last _boop_ on the nose and spins on one tall, chunky heel to wink at LaCroix where he flattens himself to the back of the couch like a cat cornered in an alley. “It’s been far too long, Sebby!”

Though even in his heyday LaCroix had been a far cry from the brutality of New York’s Princes, the position had still offered him enough sway to ensure that, from the vast majority of Kindred, such a nickname would be unacceptable. Jeanette, whether fortunately or unfortunately, is not part of that vast majority. 

It doesn’t help either that he remembers the last time she’d used that nickname.

( _Arch your back, Sebby,_ she’d cooed, and he’d done exactly that, the obedience rewarding him with sensation enough to make his toes curl and his lips part around a gasp. _There you go! Good boy, you’re doing so well._ Slender, gentle fingers combing through his hair, stroking down the length of his spine to wrap around his hips. It’d been the first time in ages he’d felt like he’d done a good job.)

He realizes his eyes have glazed over at the memory—too late, because from the flash of fangs in her smile he _knows_ she’s realized first. “You poor little thing,” she says, putting on an exaggerated pout, “you’ve been kicked all over, haven’t you?” Her hips sway as she sashays up to the couch, her thighs framed between the pleats of her skirt and the hems of her over-the-knee socks.

The pout evaporates into a sly grin as quickly as it’d appeared. “You don’t have to worry about that anymore.” Nails painted the same red as her lips flashing in his peripheral vision, she bends just slightly at the waist to reach and cup his chin, skimming a thumb along his jaw. “You know how much I like making you feel good, don’t you?”

How much had he babbled to her that time? How far had his defenses fallen to let that cloyingly warm affirmation past, and what else had slipped through with it? What had been, however guiltily, a pleasant memory suddenly smarts like a splinter dug into soft flesh, putting an awful prickling at the back of his throat.

“That’s certainly what you’d like me to think, isn’t it,” he says, tone tamped perfectly flat. It wasn’t that he hadn’t known, but—it’d been just one piece of mental clutter among many at the time, easily buried under the others. Now it’s been polished and set on a pedestal before him.

Her eyes glinting, Jeanette’s pout is a little less exaggerated this time. “Oh, ye of little faith. Can’t you take a girl at her word?”

Mercurio hurries once more to intercept. “Uh, hey, I know I didn’t give you a heads-up, and I’m sorry about that.” He circles around to the side of the couch, close enough to be in her line of sight but far enough for LaCroix to watch him without craning his neck, and spreads his arms in some combination of placation and imploration. “I promise we won’t get in your or Therese’s way—hell, we’ll skip town if that’s what you guys want.”

Those glinting eyes flicker to Mercurio, to LaCroix, and back again before Jeanette hums thoughtfully, hip cocked and knuckles lifted to her chin. “I don’t know, boys. Sebby here is a wonderful surprise, but he’s also a big one to hide from the Baron herself.” She grins, full lips over dazzlingly sharp white teeth. “I don’t suppose you’d give me some privacy to call my sister?”

To his credit, though Mercurio pales and LaCroix mutely watches his Adam’s apple bob as he swallows, he still responds. “I don’t think boss is in any shape to move from the couch, but the bathroom’s through the door that way, last room on the right. Swear we won’t listen in.”

Giggling, Jeanette plants a hand on her hip. “You’re such a sweetheart, bunny! Just remember, if you do hear anything…” She’s turning, striding in the direction Mercurio pointed. “We’ll just have to punish you,” she calls over her shoulder.

Mercurio winces. LaCroix shrinks further into the couch cushions. The door at the other end of the room shuts neatly behind Jeanette.

Somewhere on the wall, a clock ticks. And ticks. And ticks. Mercurio shuffles his feet against the edge of the rug. Though he doesn’t dare glance in that direction, LaCroix strains to catch any noise from behind the door, but either Mercurio’s apartment is soundproofed or Jeanette is employing Obfuscate.

Evidently unable to bear the silence any longer, Mercurio picks up a remote from the side table and flips on the wall-mounted television (a very flat one, at that—LaCroix could have sworn they were boxier devices a few years ago) in front of the couch, flooding the den immediately with the sound of canned laughter and a smug host. It’s a talk show.

LaCroix may have had little time to spend on idle recreation in his prior unlife, but within the first two minutes he watches, this program’s host reminds him eminently of a fair number of his Camarilla peers: self-assured, leisurely, and utterly vapid. The guest, in comparison, seems marginally sharper and far more uncomfortable; likely unfamiliar with publicity of this sort, she shifts in her seat, answering his questions a moment too late, forcing laughter at each jibe aimed toward her word choice.

The two are talking about some mortal development or other, some political episode just significant enough to hold the attention of kine and not Kindred. A senator is suspected of laundering a large portion of his campaign funds. This seems to be a source of endless amusement for the host, who makes a variety of narcotic-themed jokes, none of which his guest seems to genuinely enjoy.

At the other end of the room, the door swings open. “Sorry to keep you waiting, sweethearts!” Enough pep bolsters Jeanette’s steps that she practically bounces across the room to prop her elbows on the opposite side of the couch from Mercurio, though when she speaks after peering up at the television her tone is dismissive. “Oh, that guy.” LaCroix twists his neck to look up at her expression; her lidded eyes are distinctly disapproving. “He’s at least proof that anyone can get a show if they have the money.”

Chuckling, Mercurio shakes his head. “Greatest country in the world, huh?”

Were he inclined to, LaCroix could easily speak up and ask what Therese’s decision was. He possesses no such inclinations, and if he did the dread coiled underneath his ribs would constrict them, so he says nothing. The clock continues to tick, and the talk show continues to be obnoxious.

But all things come to an end, and so Jeanette straightens upright once more, clapping her hands together. “So, here’s the deal!” Each painted nail stands out bright, shining ruby against the pallor of her skin. “Bunny, you’re perfectly fine. You hadn’t had the little Prince for long, and you kept him someplace we could find him, after all!”

She smiles at Mercurio, whose own lips pull into a tight, uneasy line, his eyes darting down to LaCroix on the couch in the moment before she continues.

“You, on the other hand,” Jeanette says, stepping around to the front of the couch to meet LaCroix’s eyes directly. For once, there’s no tinge of coyness or teasing to her voice. “I want you to tell me something, Sebastian, and if you give me a good answer, I’ll be willing to consider it.”

One of her eyes is blue, one of her eyes is green, and both of them are focused with penetrating intensity on him. “Why should the Anarchs let you live? What have you done for us before, or what can you offer us in the future to give us any reason not to leave you for the sunrise?”

LaCroix stares up at her, chest tight, and tries to think of an answer.

He can’t.

Everything that she could have gleaned from him, everything that she already might have—it’s useless now, isn’t it? Sebastian LaCroix is no longer a Prince. He’s no longer even a member of the Camarilla. He no longer has any allies, any connections, any favors owed. After nearly two centuries, every bit of the power he had scrabbled to accrue has been plucked away from him and incinerated.

He has survived. That’s all he’s managed to do. Miserable, powerless, and all but alone, he has survived. There is no past, there is no future, only the present he so desperately clings to, and now he begins to wonder why.

It would be so hard to let go. Why? What of _any_ worth is there to hold on to?

Unthinking, he curls into his own limbs, unable to break away from her eyes but no longer seeing them. Hunger pulses through his body, a pitiful, limping Beast rather than an apex predator in any shape to hunt, and it’s only that Beast that keeps his eyes from welling.

At the other side of the couch, Mercurio hisses something under his breath. “Jeanette, come on, he’s already fucked up real bad—”

It’s like a switch is flipped. Her previous cheer lights her expression so thoroughly bright that LaCroix drifts back into himself just to watch it, to watch her beam down at him. “Well, that’s alright! I guess you couldn’t hurt much like this anyways.”

_It was a trick question,_ LaCroix’s returning rationality murmurs. _If you were a threat, you’d have made something up._

But he hadn’t, and so he was not a threat, and so Jeanette will allow him to live. Mercy through pity. Relief and shame grapple viciously and horribly in his skull.

Mercurio is kneading his temples with one hand, hunched over the couch as if winded. “So,” he croaks, “you’re gonna let the boss live, right?”

Sunnily, Jeanette nods. “Sure thing! I’ll even send Vandal down with some blood bags in a bit.” Even her stance is looser, more playful, than it had been a moment before, and she winks again at LaCroix, who continues to stare in response. “So you should be right as rain for your work interview tomorrow night.”

LaCroix’s brow furrows. “What?”

“With the Anarchs, you silly boy,” she teases, as if it’s the most natural conclusion in the world. “So make sure you’re ready! Comfy clothes, stuff you wouldn’t mind getting a little dirty.” The last word is accented with a pat of LaCroix’s head, then a sway of her hips as she turns back to the apartment door. “We’ll come get you, nine o’clock!”

Neither LaCroix nor Mercurio has the presence of mind or the bravery to ask for any more clarification before she leaves.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> take a drink every time i give Mercurio a piece of furniture he didn't originally have


	6. iii.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's hard to let go.

All Sébastien knows of the next day and night is darkness.

By his best estimate, he’s been led a ways into the estate’s manor by the time the tight, silky pressure of the blindfold is loosed from his temples—though he can see no more without it than with it. His destination is a room whose lack of light is so absolute it must be windowless, whose lack of candles renders the tile floor frost-frigid through his threadbare shoes. Beyond the dark and the cold he can discern nothing.

Uncertain, he shuffles forward, or at least what might be forward. His eyes protest the dark so vehemently that when he raises his hand, it projects a shadow into his mind’s eye. Not vision, not truly, only what his mind can’t comprehend could be missing.

The thought that he is alone scares him, but the delicate footsteps approaching from behind him scare him even more.

All the anxious dread of the visit, the carriage ride, boils over into shrill, animal panic, and he bolts. For a few instants, the darkness is just as much a veil as it is a shroud; then his shoulder slams into a stone wall with a burst of pain so fierce he nearly crumples to his knees, a hand clapped over his mouth to muffle his hiss of pain. He’s in an enclosed room, of course. There’s nowhere to run.

The footsteps continue to approach. A deep voice chuckles modestly to itself. The part of Sébastien that is more beast than man latches onto that noise, triangulating its location in the formless dark, and he is about to dart away from it again until—

He doesn’t sense the figure until it brushes against him. He couldn’t have, because it has no body heat, nor does it have breath. The panic surges again, pushes him to lash out, but before he can that cool, still figure has maneuvered behind him with their hand on his collarbone.

And it all melts away. Everything: the panic, the dread, the desperate grieving homesickness that’s wracked him for innumerable days. All of it is gone. There is a steady, piercing pressure on his neck, and he feels better than he’s ever felt in his life. He thinks he could love whatever is doing this to him. He thinks he could die from this and be happy with it.

He doesn’t think much after that.

In fact, the only thing that breaches the emptiness, vaguely resembling a thought, is the hunger.

The hunger is a thought and a feeling and everything else at once. It’s all Sébastien is, as he surfaces from a nameless abyss, that pounding crying burning hunger tearing at his stomach chest throat and he needs to satiate it, he needs needs _NEEDS_

...When he comes to again, he’s in another room. Across from him, amusement written across his chiseled features, is the man from the carriage, still wearing that ice-colored brooch. 

Sprawled on a table in front of him, only a vacant horror across her slack features, is an unmoving young woman with her throat torn out.


End file.
